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Tips & Tricks

Sergeant April's Secret Files Part I

Boot camp boss discloses favorite tips

It takes you eons and serendipity to locate those shortcut chestnuts a digi pro can spout in a second, right? But April Miller, creator of our popular Boot Camp series for the growing PC primer set, has vowed to lop your learning curve angst by disclosing her cache of treasure bytes. Enjoy a collection of these quickies each month in the .doc until we come to the end of her file (when we will grovel and slime for more!). DELETE FILES WITHOUT A MOUSE Hold down the SHIFT key when you press the DELETE key to delete a file instead of sending it to the recycle bin. ESC QUICKLY .... BAIL OUT ... BAIL OUT If you are halfway through a drag-and-drop operation and change your mind, just bang on the ESC key to bail out. The whole trick to this one is to NOT LET GO OF THE MOUSE BEFORE pressing the ESC KEY !!!! SCANDISK AND DEFRAG—YOUR DISK TOOLBOX Most of us use the Start Menu to find Scandisk and Disk Defrag or Backup. But there's a better way. In MY COMPUTER, right-click on a drive and select PROPERTIES. Click on the TOOLS tab. Here you'll get information on the last time you performed each operation, with launch buttons for each. MEM COMMAND—GOOD MEMORIES If you ever want to know what's happening with your system's use of memory, Go to START/RUN and type in MEM /c/p MORE (CONVENTIONAL) MEMORY If you're not happy with the results you received from the step above, try adding the line BUFFERS=13 to your config.sys file. Reboot your PC, perform that last tip again, and you'll find you've freed a significant amount of conventional memory, which is always at a premium. PRINT SCREEN—AND REAP THE BENEFITS When you hit the PRINT SCRN key, everything you see on your monitor is placed on the clipboard. To use it, go into any application and choose EDIT/PASTE. You will now have a picture to work with. ALT PRINT SCREEN IS EVEN BETTER IF you press ALT and PRINT SCRN, only the active Window is saved to the clipboard. This is wonderful for writing documentation. To get the result below, this is what I did: START / SETTINGS / CONTROL PANEL / SOUNDS Press ALT PRINT SCRN Open an application. I opened WordPerfect. Click on EDIT/ PASTE. And there you have it. F2—CHANGING FOLDER NAMES Press F2 to change the name of a selected file or folder. TO CHANGE AN ICON If you want to change the picture associated with an icon, right-mouseclick on the icon, choose PROPERTIES. Next, choose the SHORTCUT tab, then click on the CHANGE ICON button. Scroll through the choices and select the icon you want. Click OK twice. Wait five seconds. SECRET ICONS Whenever you change an icon, you'll be offered the default source of icons. It's in a file called SHELL32.DLL that lives in the WINDOWS/SYSTEM folder. But there's another file hidden in the system folder called PIFMGR.DLL that contains WIN95's secret stash of cool icons. Choose the SHORTCUT tab. Click on CHANGE ICON. Delete out the SHELL32.DLL and type in PIFMGR.DLL (leave everything else alone). The end result should say: C:\windows\system\pifmgr.dll. Hit the TAB KEY. You should now see a new selection of icons to choose from. Click on the ICON you want, and then click on OK twice.